Wikiality talk:Admin Board/Archive/Google Ranking
Links, the Google, & the Wikipedia Thisniss nailed it with Stephen Colbert instead of our glorious leader. We need the link names to be what will be entered into google and other search engines. It's why Wikipedia admins spend so much time worrying about google bombing. We definitely need to avoid un-bombing ourselves by getting too tricky. It's one thing to title a page that way, but then using it as a link name screws the google out our truthiness. Please link to wikipedia instead of wikip*dia so that our encyclopedic corrections bring the lost and unsaved to our factiness. For pages that use non-common titles, you can find and correct links by going to that page and clicking on the Tubes that link here. By connecting more tubes to us, the guts will soon surpass the facts and we will save the innocent school children of liberals.--Pro-Lick 19:58, 18 May 2007 (UTC) :It was a relatively easy fix to change the links for Our Glorious Stephen and Stephen Colbert, and it meant that the "Stephen Colbert" page went from being our 23rd most linked to page to being our first most linked to. We're also now at the top of the 3rd page of a google search for "Stephen Colbert," where before we were at the bottom - could be a whole host of other reasons, too, but why not make the changes we can control, eh? Anyway, I'm thinking that I can easily make a "tip tool" template for "wikip*dia" like the one I made for (which I based on the ones MC Esteban™ made for and ). Then we can move the pedo-related pages to the best google-reading link names, and use the tip-tool templates so that we can (hopefully) have our joke and eat the google rankings, too.--thisniss 21:38, 18 May 2007 (UTC) ::Here ya go: gives you . I feel the hover message is truthy, but feel free to make adjustments (or we can have multiple versions). --thisniss 21:45, 18 May 2007 (UTC) :::Sorry if I'm stupid here, but isnt the point to make it say Wikipedia in the alt-text? Are they reading our internal linkages or the amount of times the actual word is used?--MC Esteban™ 17:16, 19 May 2007 (UTC) ::::Yeah, I thought it's the associated text too. As far as I know, google complete ignores what the linked to page says and bases it's rankings completely on what the links say it is. So if we all link to pedo by calling it child (having child redirect to pedo), the rankings for child will be increased and pedo decreased. But I'll leave my trustiness to thisniss to work out the facts.--Pro-Lick 17:32, 19 May 2007 (UTC) Okay, here's what I think is going on. I will preface this all by saying I don't know shit about dick. Anyway, yes, what you are saying about the "associated text" matters, which is actually why I made the template. By which I mean, if we are trying to make a "google-bomb," then the point is to link a word or a set of words to a particular url (e.g. Greatest Living American). This is, of course, easily "diffused" - which you can see by googling Greatest Living American ( "Stephen Colbert" and "Greatest Living American" are still conversationally linked in sites talking about the google bomb, but the CN page is not ranking high on the google search). So it's not the most important thing. More important things include the url text (which is why I moved it back so the page name itself has "wikipedia" in the url), and of course the all-important backlinks. The thing that we are talking about here, though, is the "anchor text" for this link, which if I understand the MediaWiki correctly should still be "wikipedia" in the template above. I "piped" the "wikip*dia" part (wikip*dia) precisely to fix the "wikipedia" anchor text problem. Otherwise, we could still just link through the wikip*dia redirect. This is the same thing I did with the template and the change I made to all the other templates that used the phrase "Our Glorious Stephen" -- piped them so that instead of redirecting through Our Glorious Stephen, they go through Our Glorious Stephen. In this case, "Stephen Colbert" is still the "anchor text" - not "Our Glorious Stephen." It's the same with any wiki link - the "anchor text" is the part in double brackets, which points to some url (at this site, something that begins with http://www.wikiality.com/etc.etc.etc.. You can put anything you want after the |pipe, and it doesn't change the "anchor." It might count as additional anchor text - I'm not sure how that works in wiki, but I sorta doubt it because "anchor stacking" pisses the Googles off, so I can't imagine they'd let the Wikipedia get away with it. I think it's just a "bonus," but I really couldn't find anything to tell me for sure. Redirect pages are a different kind of trade-off. They can create their own weight in backlinks, especially when you start getting hundreds or thousands of pages linking through a redirect. For terms where we're not looking to rank (i.e., very few redirects), or if we want to rank for a specific phrasing (i.e., google bombing) redirects can be very helpful. We should always make them anyway, imo, to help our searching and to cut down on duplicate page creation. BUT, when we end up route all our traffic through a specific redirect, then that page becomes the url that we're pushing for the google's magical page ranking machines, and we end up making a kind of inadvertent, backwards google bomb (which is what we were doing with Our Glorious Stephen-Stephen Colbert). In fact, this whole question came up because El Payo noticed that other accidental google-bomb we'd made. Again, though, I am in Big Foot Expert territory here. --thisniss 21:12, 19 May 2007 (UTC) Google rankings, etc. Do you realize that we are the #4 Google link for "The Greatest President Ever"? Zoinks. --El Payo 04:57, 12 May 2007 (UTC) :That is the funniest thing ever. After actually working to make google ranks here and elsewhere (for example, despite my best efforts to raise Mitch McConnell to this glory, W. continues to rank as Google's favorite "coal whore"), of all the things to achieve accidentally! Wow. high-larious. :On another count, the Wikiality.com does well on several of the expected searches (I just noticed tonight that Comedy Central is paying for a Google "wikiality" link!) but I'm wondering about our lack of rank on "Stephen Colbert - you don't get to us till page 3. I'm thinking it might have something to do with our clear preference for through Our Glorious Stephen rather than directly to our Stephen Colbert page. This makes me wonder if perhaps we should flip these pages so the redirect works in the opposite direction, to help the google rankings on Stephen search? I doubt too many people are searching on "Our Glorious Stephen", but I suspect we would continue to do well there even if we flipped it.--thisniss 05:31, 12 May 2007 (UTC) :: I see us on page 1, result #9. --uno 05:07, 14 May 2007 (UTC) ::I think you make a great point. I didn't realize that pages were linking through that page. Maybe we should have an edit orgy and undo the self-inflicted damage? --El Payo 05:43, 12 May 2007 (UTC) :::Well, I was suggesting the lazier way and saying we could just flip them. Make "Our Glorious Stephen" the wikiality/stephen_colbert page (with a "move page") and make the Stephen Colbert link a redirect - it would be fewer pages to undo! But one way or another, I do think this has something to do with our google rank (or lack of) on Stephen searches. There's probably an easier remedy, though, than either one of these. Oh, maybe "wikiality/stephen_colbert/our_glorious_stephen" - I'm going to try that now!--thisniss 05:52, 12 May 2007 (UTC) ::::We should definitely not change the Stephen Colbert page to a redirect. The Google works in mysterious ways, but I suspect that they are not reading our internal linkages. --MC Esteban™ 06:34, 12 May 2007 (UTC) No, what I did was this: Stephen Colbert/Our Glorious Stephen. I made Our Glorious Stephen redirect to that. The definition needs to be filled out, but I figured we could also collect all our "pet names" there, so that the redirects are sort of "doubly redirecting." The way this page is made now, the url has both "Stephen Colbert" and "Our Glorious Stephen" built in, which is good, I think. I could be wrong, but we'll see. As far as the google reading our internal links, I think it does matter if we're directing around pages - that's why we ranked very high for the first couple of days of the "Greatest Living American" google bomb, but fell as more and more people linked to CN. But hopefully this will fix some of it. I also changed the link in the "hello" template to link directly to the Stephen page - that's probably half of the redirect links right there. Anyway, you are right, it is something of a mystery. And you're also right that we shouldn't redirect Stephen. I was just trying to figure out what to do about the fact that "Stephen Colbert" was 23rd on our "Most linked to" list, while "Our Glorious Stephen" was 4th. (without having to change thousands of links by hand, yipes!).--thisniss 07:42, 12 May 2007 (UTC) :I think The Googles possibly weighs in how many times words or a phrase are mentioned on a website, but this is probably not given much weight overall in their algorithm, or else people would just spam whatever search terms they want all over their page. The reason we fell in the rankings for Greatest Living American was because more popular, so-called quality, sites began listing the term. If they, in turn, got linked to from other sites, then they would be bumped up the list, as that is probably the most important thing when it comes to Google page rankings: ::"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." ::"Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query." :What we really need are a number of seperate pages linking, or "voting", for us with the terms Stephen Colbert. In other words, we need to be more popular. This is also why a digg page boosts us up a ton, because it is considered a "vote" from a super high-quality site. Wikipedia would probably help too, if only those wikinazis would let us link here! --MC Esteban™ 14:36, 12 May 2007 (UTC) ::Yes, the linking stuff is obviously true, but it matters to some degree how much/whether we're "directly" using the name/term "Stephen Colbert," that's alls I was saying. Not from page 3 to page 1 matters, but matters. Otherwise, it wouldn't have mattered when we added "Truthiness" to our name, etc. Popularity and the number of inter-interwebs links clearly makes much more of a difference than this, but I was just saying that this is a piece that we can try to control for in the immediate. ::Anyway, another important point you raised reminded me of something I've been meaning to ask for a while, which is that we encourage people to use Digg, StumbledUpon, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Technorati (now that we have the Humor Blog), etc. to note what we're doing here. These kinds of linkages carry more and more weight for rankings, but they're also just a good way to get the word out. I try to "Digg" (et. al.) all our new Featured Articles (though sometimes I forget), and anything that's "newsy" - like the google bomb stuff, etc. Most of the time, these stories don't get "picked up" in a huge way, but occasionally one or two of them have, and it always helps us. Plus, if I'm not the only one doing it, there's a better chance that someone else will write a "blurb" that catches people's attention. :) If anyone here has any "Digg cred", it would be a huge act of generosity to pick one or two of your favorite pages and Digg them. (I have no "Digg cred," because the only things I ever digg are wiki related, of course).--thisniss 17:35, 12 May 2007 (UTC)